The Quiet Ones / Season 1, Episode 7
Not Alone Tonight
Owen’s pencil scraped against the notebook paper, the sound sharp in the suffocating stillness of his dormitory room. His breath hitched as he pressed harder, the lead nearly snapping under the weight of his grip. The words he wrote weren’t his own—not this time. They sprawled across the page in a jagged scrawl, letters too thin and spidery to belong to his steady hand. “Not alone,” it read, and the ink seemed to bleed into the paper, pooling at the edges of each stroke like spilled blood. His stomach churned, the cold of the stone floor seeping through his socks as he hunched over the desk, the single bulb overhead casting a sickly yellow glow that didn’t reach the corners of the room. The air felt thick, heavy with the scent of damp stone and old wood, a smell that clung to the back of his throat. He swallowed hard, his pulse hammering in his ears, louder than the distant drip of a leak somewhere in the ancient plumbing of Glenmoor Academy. He hadn’t written those words. He hadn’t even thought them. But there they were, staring back at him, a violation scrawled on the one thing that still felt like his. The notebook was his voice, his tether, and now something—someone—had crawled into it. His fingers trembled as he...